Galerie Jean Fournier is pleased to be presenting a new exhibition by Peter Soriano. The exhibition centres on two recent projects: one initially presented at the Circuit art centre in Lausanne in September 2017, and the other planned for July 2018 at the annual L’Art dans les Chapelles festival in Brittany. Each ensemble combines a segment from a wall drawing with works on paper that have played their part in the development of Soriano’s projects.

Memory is a core concept in this artist’s work. In the course of his travels, and each time he is invited to create a wall drawing, he lets himself be guided by his surroundings according to a fixed protocol. He begins by visiting the site, where he takes measurements and sketches details that will provide his bearings; then, in the studio, he makes drawings on loose sheets of paper, fusions of close observation and memory that serve as a basis for the big mural works.

His main source of inspiration is landscape – views from his studio windows, for instance – and the spaces he moves through, such as architectural sites. The projects making up this exhibition bring two different notions of landscape to bear: Cresta expresses the concept of landscape and immensity via an everyday object – a chocolate wrapper – while for L’Art dans les Chapelles the project is based on the actual chapel entrusted to him.

The Cresta project sprang from an urge to convey landscape in a different way. How to communicate the idea of immensity via something tiny and easily handled? Soriano’s tweaking of a chocolate wrapper resituates our imagination. The various drawings testify to the intense deliberation leading up to the large wall drawings in Lausanne (a single sample is being presented at Galerie Fournier). Here we readily recognise his geometrical vocabulary, and his way of modulating it by recourse to different media.

For L’Art dans les Chapellesin July 2018, the drawings that will accompany the big mural composition in the Chapelle Saint-Jean at Le Sourn reveal a Soriano more concerned with the idea of moving about, as in his exploration of the chapel and his projection of viewer movement. A detail that caught his attention was the way the layout of the granite flagstones divided up the space and shaped a path towards the altar. This project shows the artist crossing a new threshold towards greater formal freedom, in drawings that are more painterly and colourful. In a departure from the ideas of the diagram and mathematical abstraction, he is committing to the domain of the imaginary. The rectangular shapes are seen simultaneously as opaque, extremely dense blocks and, via pure mental projection, as an alignment of stained glass windows blending translucency with shifting, shimmering colours.